Profile of Ivana Brlic-Mazuranic on Famous Like Me

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1874-1938) ranks among the top Croatian writers. Within Croatia as well as internationally she is praised as the best Croatian writer for children.

Life

She was born on April 18, 1874 in Ogulin, Croatia into a well known Croatian family of Mažuranić. Her father Vladimir Mažuranić was a writer, lawyer and historian who wrote Prinosi za hrvatski pravno-povjestni rječnik (Croatian dictionary for history and law) in 1882. Her grandfather was the famous politician, the Croatian ban and poet Ivan Mažuranić, while her grandmother Aleksandra Mažuranić was the sister of well known linguist Dimitrije Demetar. Ivana was largely home-schooled. With the family she moved first to Karlovac, then to Jastrebarsko, and ultimately to Zagreb.

Upon marriage to Vatroslav Brlić, a politician and a prominent lawyer in 1892, she moved to Brod na Savi where entered another known family and lived there for most of her life. She devoted all her work to her family and education. As the mother of six, she had the ability to identify with the psyche of the child, to understand the purity and naïveté of their world. Her first literary creations which were initially written in French language.

Work

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić started writing poetry, diaries and essays rather early but her works were not published until the beginning of the 20th century. Her stories and articles like the series of educational articles under the name "School and Holidays" started to be published more regularly in the journals after the year 1903.

It was in 1913 when her book "The Marvellous Adventures and Misadventures of Hlapić the Apprentice" (Čudnovate zgode i nezgode šegrta Hlapića) was published and really caught the literary public's eye. In the story, the poor apprentice Hlapić searches for his master's daughter as his luck turns for the better.

Critics consider her book "Tales of Long Ago" (Priče iz davnine), which was published in 1916 to be the most valuable. Work contains motifs from mythological wisdom and the beliefs of the ordinary people gained with the time, puzzles and else. All contents as well the characters names are from the Slavic mythology of the people of Slavonia and Croatia. With this book, the lost world of the pre-Christian Croatian beliefs was brought to life once again, in the form of the fairy tale.

List of works

• 1902 The good and the mischievous
• 1905 School and holidays
• 1912 Pictures (poetry)
• 1913 The Marvellous Adventures and Misadventures of Hlapić the Apprentice
• 1916 Tales of Long Ago
• 1923 A Book for Youth
• 1937 JaÅ¡a Dalmatin Viceroy of the Gujarati
• 1939 Gingerbread Heart

Her books of novels and fairy tales for children, originally intended to educate her own, have been translated into nearly all European languages. Highly regarded and valued by both national and foreign literary critics, she obtained the title of Croatian Andersen.

Brlić-Mažuranić was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature twice, in 1931 and in 1938. She was also the first woman accepted into what is today Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1937. She died on September 21, 1938 in Zagreb, commiting a suicide after suffering from depression.

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